Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Bush's Die Hard

Some say that this most recent Die Hard movie is George W's Die Hard movie. According to Alternet (via The Huffington Post) since Ronald Reagan there has been a Die Hard movie for every administration since.

I never noticed, but this movie certainly could be George's movie because it's filled with violence and chaos and a state of utter confusion and disorder.

It scared me because it gave a glimpse of an America in which pandemonium rules. Between kick-ass action beats, when McClane and his young hacker sidekick make their way to a D.C. police station after all the traffic lights and phones have gone out, and the stock market has collapsed and every city's transportation system has shut down, we get a brief, slo-mo sense of what true chaos feels like -- it's post-Katrina New Orleans on a national scale.

Even scarier, the government is totally unprepared. ("It took FEMA five days to get water to the Superdome," the hacker reminds us.) That's what makes this George W.'s Die Hard: it's explicitly Homeland Security's incompetence and indifference that make the nation so defenseless. In fact, the terrorist mastermind is a former government security expert who wants to prove the network's vulnerability. So, naturally, a bald, fifty-something Luddite cop is America's only hope. But if Bruce Willis won't come to our rescue in real life, who will?